MixedBookforumA tedious work of prose ... Baggy and vast ... The book, to me at least, is the memoir. The novella feels like ephemera ... Gimmicky ... It is so preoccupied with its conceptual project that it forgets to be funny. It is a humorless, completely self-serious book. It lacks the sense of playfulness that experimental prose demands in order to be legible. At its worst, it panders to us ... Exhausting to read ... I couldn’t help but feel like [the] references...exist to pad Lacey’s prose. To dazzle us without actually doing so. They take away from the book’s brutal emotional reality ... And this is what is actually dazzling about The Möbius Book,the moments when it does not speak in generalities about suffering and instead opts to be plain and specific ... The Möbius Book is at its best when Lacey dutifully transcribes these banal horrors. These are the moments I found the most truly heartbreaking.
